Crusoe’s Books: Readers in the Empire of Print, 1800–1918 by Bill Bell (review)

Reviewed by: Crusoe's Books: Readers in the Empire of Print, 1800–1918 by Bill Bell Lars Atkin Crusoe's Books: Readers in the Empire of Print, 1800–1918. By Bill Bell. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2021. xii+271 pp. £35. ISBN 978–0–19–289469–4. Capturing the history of reading can be a frustrating job for the book historian. Even where we have minute books and borrowing records from libraries, discovering what readers actually thought about the books they borrowed often relies more on educated speculation than firm evidence. In Crusoe's Books, Bill Bell's elegantly structured and exhaustively researched new history of what he terms the British Empire's 'itinerant' or 'mobile' 'reading constituencies' (p. 32), Bell turns to personal journals, ephemeral periodicals, and social history in order to excavate the reading habits and preferences of some of the British Empire's most elusive readers. The book's five chapters cover shipboard periodicals produced by emigrants; convict readers aboard prison hulks; first-generation Scottish settlers in Canada; the reading habits aboard Captain Scott's Antarctic expedition; and finally, the mobile libraries provided to soldiers on the Western Front during the First World War. In one of Crusoe's Books' stand-out chapters, Bell guides the reader on the journey a transported convict would make from the prison hulks of Britain to arrival in New South Wales, Australia. As co-ordinates for our sea voyage, Bell offers us book catalogues from prison libraries, memoirs of life in New South Wales and Norfolk Island, and commentary on prisoners' use and abuse of 'improving' religious literature by official visitors from the British and Foreign Bible Society. To chart prisoners' active resistance to the religious literature delivered for their improvement by officialdom, Bell offers, among other sources, subversive poems composed by felons on the flyleaves of the very books that were supposed to reform their morals (p. 103). [End Page 408] Bell's chapter on soldiers' reading habits during the First World War navigates the Leavisite literary debate between 'great' and 'popular' literature that raged during the first half of the twentieth century, and the various moral panics this debate induced regarding the reading taste of the masses. As well as turning to official sources such as the output of the War Propaganda Bureau and semi-official publications such as The Wipers Times, Bell examines memoirs, popular fiction, and the books donated by the public to feed the minds of the print-starved Tommy. What comes across again is the diversity of readers whose individual lives are illuminated by Bell's meticulous approach to his sources, from the private explaining the symbolism of the Greek plates to officers as he served them dinner to the expressions of frustration articulated by YMCA volunteers who had to unpack donations for front-line troops that included leaflets entitled 'How to Organize Mothers' Meetings' (p. 203). In less able hands such an eclectic range of sources and reading constituencies might risk seeming miscellaneous, but Bell's measured commentary and sociological interest in the ways in which institutional pressures to conform to prescribed ways of reading were subverted and resisted by individual readers guide the reader through the plenitude of sources that Bell gathers as evidence of individual reading practices. In fact, Crusoe's Books is that rarest of beasts—an academic monograph that is also a thorough joy to read from cover to cover. As well as being of interest to scholars of book history, Crusoe's Books will appeal to anyone interested in the literary or social history of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Lars Atkin University of Kent Copyright © 2024 The Modern Humanities Research Association

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